This invention relates to elastomeric block polymers of conjugated dienes which contain alcohol units in the diene blocks. The invention also relates to a process for making such polymers from epoxidized diene block polymers.
Conventional A--B--A block copolymers are known to be useful in coatings, sealants, adhesives and modified asphalts but their usefulness in such products is not as great as it could be if these polymers did not suffer from deficiencies in certain-physical properties. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 3,792,005 disclosed that coatings can be made using block polymers of A--B--A type where A is a monovinyl aromatic polymer block, usually polystyrene (S), and B is a rubber polymer block, usually hydrogenated polybutadiene (EB) or hydrogenated polyisoprene (EP). These polymers could be specially useful in elastomeric coatings because they can be formulated to have good flexibility and therefore, will not crack during thermal cycling, an important requirement for roof coatings, for example, or during metal forming, where the coating becomes stretched as the metal is bent. However, coatings based on conventional A--B--A type block copolymers are deficient in that they lack strong adhesion and in applications in which the coating will contact organic liquids such as gasoline, or high temperatures; the coatings merely dissolve or melt off of the substrate.
It would be advantageous to provide block polymers of this type which had enhanced physical properties. By functionalizing these conventional block polymers, they can be crosslinked to give polyurethane structures which will have better physical properties and thus be more useful than the conventional block polymers in many coatings, sealants, adhesives and modified asphalts.
The known curable or crosslinked coatings which are based on vinyl aromatics and conjugated diolefins do not have particularly good long term heat, weather and ultraviolet stability due to the need to utilize unhydrogenated polymers (it is difficult to add functional groups without using unhydrogenated polymers). Hydrogenation is known to improve long term heat, weather and ultraviolet stability, but it removes the double bonds which are needed to add functional groups which can be crosslinked.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a block polymer which can be modified so that it is substantially free of residual olefinic double bonds and can be crosslinked by reaction with amino resins and isocyanates. Further, it is an object of this invention to provide a coating composition which is based on this crosslinkable block polymer.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a process for making such block polymers which achieves high conversion in relatively short reaction time to a well defined product under mild conditions. In the past, strong mineral acids, such as perchloric acid, have been used to react epoxidized polymers such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,555,112, 3,607,977 and 3,607,982. However, perchloric acid is undesirable because it forms explosive compounds. Special facilities must be provided to handle the acid in its concentrated form. The reaction times required to achieve reasonable conversion also tend to be relatively long (the examples specify reaction times on the order of six hours). These examples are also limited to polymers which possess high levels of epoxy functionality. It is not obvious that these conditions could result in substantial amounts of alcohol functionality when applied to polymers possessing relatively low levels of epoxy functionality. Gel formation (crosslinking), inefficient conversion to the alcohol and discoloration have been a problem in systems using sulfuric acid as the catalyst. It would be advantageous to provide a process for making hydroxyl functional derivatives of epoxidized diene block polymers under mild conditions which avoid these problems.
It would also be advantageous for this process to result in substantial conversion at reaction times on the order of one hour. Further, it would be advantageous to demonstrate that these conditions are applicable to hydrogenated diene block copolymers which contain low levels of primarily highly-substituted (tri- and tetra- alkyl substituted) epoxy groups. The present invention provides such a means by opening the hindered epoxy rings of a hydrogenated diene block copolymer to introduce reactive hydroxyl functionality to the polymer backbone.